1.Roger Fry & Clive Bell Prof Kenneth G Hay The University of Leeds (UK) 1 Roger Fry (1866-1934) n b.London 1866, of the prestigious 18th-century family which made its fortune in the chocolate trade, porcelain and early railways. They were the sponsors of Bristol University. n Worked as a critic, art historian, museum director, university Professor. n Part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ which included Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell, and Duncan Grant. 2 The Bloomsbury Group n A group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. n This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with Cambridge University for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts.” Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys (neither members of n Their works and outlook deeply Bloomsbury), Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. 3 The Bloomsbury Group n 10 core members n Clive Bell, art critic n Vanessa Bell, post-impressionist painter n E. M. Forster, fiction writer n Roger Fry, art critic and post-impressionist painter n Duncan Grant, post-impressionist painter n John Maynard Keynes, economist n Desmond MacCarthy, literary journalist n Lytton Strachey, biographer n Leonard Woolf, essayist and non-fiction writer n Virginia Woolf, fiction writer and essayist n In addition to these ten, Leonard Woolf, in the 1960s, listed as 'Old Bloomsbury' Adrian and Karin Stephen, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Molly MacCarthy, with Julian Bell, Quentin Bell and Angelica Bell, and David Garnett as later additions. Except for Forster, who published Roger Fry and his wife Helen (1897) three novels before the highly successful “Howards End” in 1910, the group were late developers. 4 Bloomsbury Ethics n Influenced by G. E. Moore: "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge.” n Moore's “Principia Ethica” (1903) expounded the notion of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value. As with the distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behaviour), n There were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs among the individual members. The greatest ethical goods were, "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation of: "art for art's sake". Vanessa Bell, by Roger Fry 5 Bloomsbury Aesthetics n Roger Fry joined the group in 1910. His post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second revolution following on the Cambridge philosophical one. This time the Bloomsbury painters were much involved and influenced. Fry and other Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art. n These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction, influenced above all by Clive Bell's "concept of 'Significant Form', which separated and elevated the concept of form above content in works of art” it has been suggested that, with their "focus on form ...Bell's ideas have come to stand in for, perhaps too much so, the aesthetic principles of the Bloomsbury Group”. n The establishment's hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell polemicised post-impressionism in his widely read book “Ar”t (1914), basing his aesthetics partly on Roger Fry’s art criticism and G. E. Moore's moral philosophy; and as the war came he argued that, "in these days of storm and darkness, it seemed right that at the shrine of civilization - in Bloomsbury, I mean - the lamp should be tended assiduously". “Nina Hamnett” by Roger Fry (1917) 6 “Vision and Design” (1920) n Set of 25 essays on topics ranging from African Art to Giotto and William Blake to contemporary domestic architecture. n Highlighted the ‘common ground’ of ancient art and modern art, life and art. n Bushmen drawings, for example differ from most ‘primitive’ art, including children’s art, for their preference for retinal rather than conceptual imagery; n “Post-impressionists do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life but to find an equivalent for life.” n Fry was friend and mentor to the Bloomsbury group - Virginia Woolf wrote his biography and “Vision & Design” was a major contribution to their aesthetic. 7 Fry: “Vision & Design” n Fry, in defending Post- Impressionism to a hostile public, asked that we shouldn’t look at Cézanne as we would look at 19th- century academic art but rather as doing the same kind of thing as Giotto - in terms of “values of form, design and expression”(Tilghman, pp. 74-5) n Fry was deeply critical of establishment 19th-century academicism: “As the prostitute professes to sell love, so these gentlemen professed to sell beauty.” n Fry’s “Essay in Aesthetics” is mid- A Room at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Matisse Room, way through the period covered by by Vanessa Bell, Leonard’s sister-in-law, 1912 the book and forms his most important theoretical statement. 8 Fry: “An Essay on Aesthetics” n In order to appreciate a painting, said Fry, the mind has to be clear of all extraneous clutter: n All emotional and literary association, n All conceptual or intellectual puzzles it might provoke for the mind n All discussion about whether or not the work was like or unlike nature had to be forgotten before any just aesthetic evaluation could be arrived at. n Waler Pater, in “The School of Giorgione” (1877) had argued that paintings were paintings, before they were illustrations or reminders of natural; appearances. For Pater, “essentially pictorial qualities must first of all delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass”…A great picture has no more definite meaning for us than an accidental play of sun and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor.” n Fry adopted Pater’s stance and used it as a critique of abstract and sentimental theories of ‘Beauty’ . 9 Fry: “An Essay on Aesthetics” n Fry was sceptical of the ‘coarse, turbulent, clumsy art of the 19th-century’ and suspicious of the ‘operatic’ gestures of the Baroque, but he did bring aspects of the aesthetic experience sharply into focus.. n He understood profoundly the Florentine preoccupation with the third dimension, he argued persuasively in defence of Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, and he was eloquent about South American sculpture and African art n The key point in Fry’s aesthetic is the radical distinction between art and nature. n Similarities between art objects and natural effects were merely superficial. In reality they were quite distinct experiences. n Nature offers the mind a mass of undifferentiated stimuli with no purpose attached. n Art however, is organised, structured and purposive. (This is more or less a restatement of Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885): “To say to a painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano…Nature is very rarely right.” n Fry’s first art teacher, Francis Bate, insisted on the separation of art from moral considerations; and in the work of George Santayana and Denman Waldo Ross (known to Fry), there is an attempt to formulate theories which locate aesthetic satisfaction within the work of art itself. “ ” Still Life by Roger Fry 10 Fry: “An essay on Aesthetics” n It was Bernard Berenson’s description of Florentine painting, however, and Giotto in particular) that encouraged Fry in his analysis of the formal properties of art. n Giotto, said Berenson, attains “a keener sense of reality, of life-likedness than the objects themselves” n This was achieved, not through illusionistic tricks, or slavish copying of appearances, but by careful selection of telling formal relationships. n It was “upon form and form alone that the great Florentine masters concentrated their efforts”, so that “finally we are forced to the belief that, in their pictures at least, form is the principal source of aesthetic enjoyment.” n Fry tried to extend this observation to cover a much wider compass of aesthetic experience and apply it to all art, from ancient to modern. n His distinction between ‘the instinctive life’ (of practicalities, doing and striving, bound up with ethics) and ‘the imaginative life’ (of contemplation, objective, withdrawn from the pressures of daily life and remote from morality) Giotto, “The Expulsion of Joaquim”, Padua, Arena Chapel, (1305-8) 11 Fry: “An essay on Aesthetics” n Both aspects of mind have their own way of apprehending the external world. The instinctive relies on a utilitarian, analytical vision, dominated by concepts; The imaginative life, however operates according to a system of aesthetic values and is associated with an intuitive, creative, synthesising view of the physical world. n Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” (1898) argued that all previous aesthetic theories understood ‘aesthetic value’ as an abstract notion - Beauty, Truth and Goodness have no definite meaning, and hinder us attaching any definite meaning to art. So Tolstoy developed an expressive theory of art: n “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and. Having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines colours, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.” n Art is not the creation of beauty, but the generation of expressive forms which communicate emotion.